In chapters One and Two, we have outlined two seemingly rather different discourses.
At first sight fandom and cinephilia seem worlds apart, but, using a specific example, it can be seen that hybrid discourses are emerging online which neither literature quite accounts for. Before we attempt to investigate the precise parameters of the relationship between fandom and cinephilia, it may help to outline one possible response to a film, in a general sense, examining how it manifests itself in order to see whether it fits into one category or the other. This way, we can get a sense of the fluidity of filmic love, observing that neither discourse fully accounts for the reactions to film which are now emerging.
As we will see, any discussion of the adoration associated with the Star Trek franchise is prone to be caught up in questions of the difference between cinephilia and fandom.
It is a highly popular series of television programmes and films – the latter of which we will be concentrating on here – and I must, from the offset, confess a particular liking for it. There is, of course, a vast difference between the two positions: fandom is characterised by a type of playful adoration, whereas the cinephile’s approach to his subject matter is more prone to questioning and – often academic – inquisition. Yet there has been academic inquisition associated with Star Trek, from oddly divergent quarters; it could be argued that this inquisition, which extends beyond the realm of fandom, constitutes the cinephilia associated with Star Trek. Either way, both stem from ‘an intense liking’ for film. Thus I would argue that the two are not mutually exclusive; while they remain distinct discourses, as we have seen there are points at which the two blur to form a third, hybrid discourse. In the case of Star Trek, we can certainly see the opening up of ‘Collaborative Remix Zones’ Hudson and Zimmerman allude to, as well as the Textual Poaching Jenkins describes, yet Star Trek is also, we will see, a focus for cinephilia or cinephilia-like activity.
Moreover, it has been argued that film production methods went through a paradigmatic shift after George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977). This, in turn, can be said to have brought about a cinephilia of the digital age, an age of computer graphics, and of the awe inspired by, say, watching star ships collide (Sperb 2007, 49). It is this variety
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of cinephilia which interests us, as it has aspects of fandom. In his appraisal of his experience associated with Star Trek: Nemesis (Baird, 2002), Jason Sperb wrote:
The dynamic incision of pleasure, its disruptions and its openings, is a central though seldom foregrounded issue within the immense body of critical film studies. And the lingering visibility of pleasure's discursive scar, cinephilia, has not been masked with the emergence of digital visual effects, but rather has become intensified, throbbing, in tandem with the rising awareness of its mutating and liberatory possibilities. Thus, I have a sense that something, in a wave of digital cinephobia, has been missed thus far--a gap in thinking about the unthought, and about cinephilia in the contemporary historical period.
(Sperb, 2007, 49)
Sperb argues that the same kind of obsessive love, the same kind of abstract emotional tug that Bazin outlined – ‘’ pleasure's discursive scar’’ - can still be found in the modern digital era. To him, cinephilia has not been discarded but intensified by the emergence of digital effects, although this has not been picked up upon by other writers due to their ‘digital cinephobia’. He holds that, while many writers are yet to embrace new technologies, cinephiliac joy can still be found in the digital era. He references Keathley, arguing that cinephiliac moments can still be reached in the science fiction film.
Halfway through the film, the Starship Enterprise collides head-on with the Reman battleship, the Scimitar, in a striking sequence featuring effective model work, sensual digital imagery, and hauntingly sparse sounds. Score drops off the soundtrack, leaving only the boom of the collision, followed by the awkward silence of space. When I tried to explain the impact this moment had on me, however, I could only say, "I just really liked the scene where the ships collided. It felt real." (Sperb 2007, 50)
Sperb argues that this, for him, was a cinephiliac moment, inasmuch as it was a moment of complete, inexplicable adoration, just as Keathley defines them. Thus, irrespective of this moment’s place within the Star Trek franchise, Sperb shows that the cinephile’s obsession with fleeting moments in film can occur within a special-effects driven blockbuster. It is clear, to my mind at least, that Sperb is not a ‘Trekkie’
– that is to say he is not a traditional Star Trek fan. He defines himself and his friend as ‘aspiring academics’; the fact that he is drawn to write about his experience of this film leads one to infer that he is a cinephile as one of the hallmarks of cinephilia, of any stripe, is the compulsion to articulate the experience of watching a film. He writes that, “My inability to provide an objective or logical reason for this love is a hallmark
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of the cinephiliac moment. As Christian Keathley explains, “Because cinephiliac moments are themselves intensely subjective, bound up perhaps with personal value of some unrecoverable meaning, writing about such moments will often mobilize personal information" (Keathley 2006, 145). Thus, somehow, Nemesis awoke the cinephiliac within me.” (Sperb 2007, 50) His article allows us something akin to the perspective of the outsider looking in: clear of the pseudo-emotional baggage of fandom, but still maintaining a respect for the franchise. Thus in a way Sperb could be said to straddle both discourses. As such, Sperb rejects claims that cinephilia has ended.
If cinephilia has waned for spectators of Sontag's generation, it might be because they hold on so tightly to a historically specific mode of cinephilia (described above) that newer, "young" generations seem unable to grasp (unable to reproduce or proliferate); particularly since exhibition and distribution practices have changed so radically in the past three decades.
Paradoxically, cinephilia must embrace the unrepeatable in order to be repeatable--that is, free the fragments of the cinephiliac moment from their social and historical origins. [Sontag continues] "if cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love" (122). (Sperb 2007, 57)
Sperb seems to suggest that this ‘new type of cine-love’ is the adoration of the big screen CGI extravaganza that has arisen in the wake of the 1977 Lucasian paradigm shift. However, he and other writers who have chosen to address Star Trek in a cinephiliac fashion – to whom I will turn shortly – all locate their discourses in relation to more classical thinkers like Bazin and Lacan. It is as if in order to legitimise their own work they need to root them in previous discourses. Even though Sperb claims his love for this moment in Star Trek: Nemesis is irrational and inarticulate, he goes on to attempt to correct that by modelling his experience on the theories of Bazin. Typically for a cinephile he grounds his experience in a theoretical base while still maintaining he can never fully account for his love. This, as argued above, is one of the hallmarks of modern cinephilia (and, by extension, the study of cinephilia) – the overriding compulsion to attempt to explain the inexplicable. The cinephile knows that he can never explain his love, yet is somehow compelled to do so. Sperb writes:
I write here about Nemesis precisely because it instils in me that which I cannot quite grasp, but which also causes me to believe that we can make an
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intelligible argument about something--namely, the virtual pleasures of effects such as CGI. (Sperb 2007, 54)
This writer would seem to maintain, then, that even in the modern era of film-making, that inarticulable ‘pricking’ that both Barthes and Keathley outline, is achievable.
Sperb admits that he cannot quite define what he finds so intriguing or enjoyable about the computer-generated fragments, but still seems compelled to do so. Unlike writers before him, however, the details in the image he fixates upon are not those the camera captures by accident, but ones deliberately created on computers. We can therefore see a shift in the focus of cinephilia to engage with new technologies, or, rather, the merging of cinephilia with aspects of fandom to form a third discourse.
However, one could argue that with its focus on the special effects spectacle, films such as Star Trek: Nemesis are designed precisely to motivate such a reaction. That is to say, sequences such as the one cited by Sperb are intended to be memorable, to make the audience gasp in unison. To this end, as Sperb outlines, the technicians responsible for computer effects went to great lengths to add as much peripheral detail as possible. This is obviously a reflection of the cinephile’s obsession with the marginal detail, and the fragmentary or peripheral moments within film. Sperb details how the debris of the Starship collision catches his eye to the point that he fixates on it. He notes that, “In the course of making a film, technicians will spend months on a single sequence, or even a single shot, with the anticipation that it is the fragments (embedded within the more celebrated spectacle of the overall effects images) that will cement the film's attraction.” (Sperb 2007, 52) Thus such fragments are fetishised; the viewer fixates, as he is intended to, on such details, even if he is not conscious of doing so. This gives such films the effect of realism, even if they are so manifestly fiction. He adds:
Moreover, it is often the affective jolt of fragments (debris, rubble, scraps, particles), more so than the intended central object of the image (spaceships, say), that adds to the sense of realism in these shots, giving them a de-familiarizing effect--just when one might be inclined to say that "of course, the shot is fake," a fragment, or two, or a hundred, scatter across the screen, which then disrupts that conscious assumption. (Sperb 2007, 52)
Hence what is so obviously fake (humanity has not yet built sovereign-class starships) is awarded the appearance of reality, allowing Sperb to fixate upon it. Indeed, this
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might be said of film as a whole: after all, its very grammar requires the viewer to suspend disbelief. As Bazin notes in What is Cinema?, shot/reverse shot, so beloved of Hollywood directors, is a fiction.
If the film is to fulfil itself aesthetically we need to believe in the reality of what is happening while knowing it to be tricked. Obviously the spectator does not have to know that there were three or even four horses or that someone had to pull on a cotton thread to get the horse to turn its head at the right moment. All that matters is that the spectator can say at one and the same time that the basic material of the film is authentic while the film is also truly cinema. So the screen reflects the ebb and flow of our imagination which feeds on a reality for which it plans to substitute. That is to say, the tale is born of an experience that the imagination transcends. (Bazin 1967, 48)
Therefore for Bazin, Keathley and Sperb, the very act of film viewing is founded on the need for the viewer to ignore the fact that what he is viewing is a trick; all three maintain, too, that this effect is eased by the inclusion of peripheral details. We know that, when we watch two people holding a conversation in which the director employs shot/reverse shot, each person’s utterances are filmed separately, but we choose to disbelieve this fact and allow ourselves to be swept away in the fiction: the viewers’
imagination must transcend the experience; the fiction must take on a reality, enabling the viewer to almost enter into it. The more detail that is included in the shot, the easier the viewer finds it to do so as the more it pertains to reality. Similarly, when we watch starships collide, the more peripheral detail is included, the more it “feeds on reality” and the more likely we are to accept and – perhaps – fetishise the sequence.
However, perhaps it would be accurate to state that we are more likely to believe or fetishise a shot – as opposed to disregarding it – if it fits our ideas and preconceived ideas concerning reality. After all, nobody has seen two starships collide. The more an image pertains to a preconceived notion of reality, the more likely it is to be fetishised. Barthes stresses that punctum operates on a personal level, leading one to assume that every viewer’s notion of what is true or real is different. It may be because we all have similar notions about the structure of looking – there must be an object and a viewer – that we accept shot/reverse shot as a depiction of reality, even though it is fiction. Hence Sperb fetishises this sequence in Star Trek: Nemesis because it fits his personal notion of reality. Indeed, this is a film which has a starship with an American-sounding name – The Enterprise – opposed by a ship with an
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Islamic-sounding name: The Scimitar. Thus, through this choice of names, the sequences may have resonated with an American public at the time very fearful of Islam. Thus one could speculate that Sperb is attracted to this scene because the real, or his notion thereof, happens to burst forth from an otherwise ‘lacklustre’ film: it reinforces a pre-existing, comforting opposition – western ‘democracy’ versus Islam.
However, this contrasts strongly with the reasons why Bazin and the writers of Cahiers Du Cinema highlighted moments in film for special attention. As Keathley notes, within such moments they sought to detect the mark of the director. They scanned the screen, looking for his or her artistry. Thus, unlike Sperb, their fixation on the fragmentary was motivated by something more than pure joy. As we saw in Chapter One, there was a firm rationale behind these moments which was expressed with unabashed enthusiasm; what Sperb writes about seems to lack that rationale. He seems uninterested, for example, in the intent or personality of the director. It seems that what matters for writers like Sperb, in the era of digital cinephilia, is the extent to which a moment seems ‘real’: moments which strike one personally, or moments which pull one into a film. If this is true then it would imply that cinephilia in its modern incarnation has a basis in notions of ‘the real’; that is to say, viewers are drawn towards images that ‘fit’ or reinforce their own reality. This type of filmic love should be seen as distinct from the original discourse of cinephilia, as it has taken on aspects of fandom and lost aspects central to the writing of the original cinephiles.
In order to deal with how this third discourse has manifested itself in relation to Star Trek, then, one must address why something so manifestly unreal (more so than any other type of film) is so popular. It could be argued that, although it is so obviously fiction, things like Star Trek appeal to one’s notion of reality on other levels. Many have pointed out its allegorical nature. Others have argued that it offers viewers a vision of the future that is comforting to many: it would seem to prophecise a future in which man has united as one. This is part of Star Trek’s attraction from a fannish perspective; one of the reasons why fans want to ‘play’ in a text is because it presents one with a utopian vision of the future. Of course, others have argued that this would be a dystopia in reality – it could be argued that the idea of a ‘United Earth’ is a fascist idea, and that Star Trek’s vision of the future in fact has Earth controlled by a military dictatorship or, perhaps, a US hegemony, a planet remade in America's image. That
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aside, the question remains: how do the Star Trek films present us with visions of ‘the real’ which many find so attractive? Why is Sperb so fascinated by the collision of the Scimitar and the Enterprise; and why has a scene from the eighth Star Trek film, Star Trek: First Contact (Frakes, 1996) fascinated me for over ten years?
The scene in question opens with Picard sitting at the table in the meeting room of the Enterprise. He appears to be mending a weapon, which, again, strikes one as uncharacteristic of him and leads one to infer his more aggressive mood. This shot lasts around half a second. The director, Jonathan Frakes, then chooses to cut to the door. Lily, the films ingénue, enters through it and instantly delivers the line “You son of a bitch!” Swearing is very rare in Star Trek; the only other time it was used was a comedic “Oh shit,” from Data in Star Trek: Generations (Carson, 1994). We therefore infer that this is unlike any other moment in Star Trek. Lily has a strong southern-American accent, which contrasts with (or perhaps acts as counterpoint to) Picard’s English accent7. This difference with accent and diction is instantly noticeable when Picard replies with “This really isn’t the time.” Hence the question of power and who is in control arises from the offset. The Captain tries to maintain his power; indeed, at this point, he still acts like he is in control. He is still clinging to the dominant order in which black is subordinate to white, woman is subordinate to man, and the young are subordinate to the old. But, as the ingénue, Lily fails to respect this order, and holds her ground.
We then see a headshot of her forcefully explaining her views: “Okay, I don’t know jack about the twenty-fourth century, but everyone out there [on the bridge] knows that staying here and fighting the Borg is suicide; they’re just afraid to come in here and say it.” Again the contrast in diction is clear. Lily uses slang, whereas Picard’s lines are well enunciated. By arguing with the Captain, she is repeatedly disregarding the normal order – the ‘chain of command’ to which Picard clings. Thus we already see a set of binary oppositions being set up. Predictably, then, Picard enunciates: “The crew is accustomed to following my orders.” It is noteworthy that Picard does not look up, nor has he throughout this entire exchange. His attitude shows that he believes the symbolic order cannot be broken, and therefore he does not need to acknowledge Lily. His concept of ‘I’, imbued in him from the Mirror Stage and intertwined with concepts of power (maleness, age, rank, etc.) is so strong that he
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does not (or does not want to) acknowledge it being broken down. Thus, Lily’s reply,
does not (or does not want to) acknowledge it being broken down. Thus, Lily’s reply,